Okay, so we don’t have a 34^th Street where I’m from. We’re more like the rest of America when we reach Ninth Ave in nearby Yorkville (not the one in Manhattan). Anyway, if you’ve been following our updates for the meeting this Sunday in NYC, I submitted a petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday (a request for review of one of my test cases for parenting equity in our courts). Now for the rest of the story. It almost didn’t happen, and I wish I had a nice professional explanation on how it miraculously did minutes before a 6 pm deadline. But I don’t. Simply stated, it must have had something to do with that teleconference this past Sunday with religious and family rights advocates. Anyway, after working long hours on the project, I discovered on the morning of its due date that the petition did not satisfy certain highly technical print requirements. By 11 am, I nearly abandoned the filing effort because in our small town, there is no print shop capable of assembling 55 booklets of the kind which the Supreme Court requires in a matter of hours. Then a friend at my regular location referred me to a special contact. I quickly called and drove my papers to his shop (we have no traffic problems in our metro area). I then learned that he had completed such a writ project only weeks earlier and reworked the booklets after they had been rejected (giving them a 60 day extension). Imagine the chances of that in our town given the small number of petitions nationwide. Even more fortunate, the two partners had done work for my office when it had a staff and both had experienced parenting injustices among family and friends. They were familiar with my reform movement and had evidently read my full page advertisement which was recently paid for by a former client (available on this site). They dropped everything, directed me to e-mail them certain files, and by the grace of God, the 40 booklets with copies upon adversary counsel were all completed and timely submitted with filing fee. This may not have occurred on 34^th Street, but it features the same Christmas “spirit”. Happy Holidays to all of our friends and followers. We look forward to seeing those of you coming to the Plaza Hotel.

Leon R. Koziol, J.D.